Jeong Euijin returned to the hideout at eleven o’clock, and the moment he stepped inside, he could feel the villa and its surroundings teeming with unfamiliar presences.
More people came than I expected.
When Eclipse’s leader had suggested gathering the forces of Zone 2 to form an alliance, he hadn’t thought much of it. The words “Main Quest initiation” and “First Sequence” seemed to have stirred a fair amount of alarm even in their easygoing leader — but for Jeong Euijin, that wasn’t what was on his mind.
I still couldn’t find them.
He clenched his jaw to hold back the kind of sigh that would have carried despair in it. Even that alone must have been enough to intimidate the people standing nearby, because the quiet murmuring around him vanished in an instant.
Jeong Euijin turned over and over in his mind the faint silhouette and vivid voice of an NPC whose face he’d never seen. As though reminding himself that he could not afford to forget even a fragment.
They’re definitely alive. They have to be.
Not a single handful of black ash had been found at the site of the Special Supply Station.
An NPC who was nothing like what an NPC should be — surely they had found some way out before the Special Supply Station was destroyed.
…That was what he wanted to believe. What he had to believe.
“Jeong Euijin.”
He was climbing the stairs with a face gone cold and dark when he crossed paths with Heo Yunji, who was coming down as though she’d been on her way to meet him. Unlike him, she looked like something good had happened — her energy was unmistakably bright.
“Looks like you found a useful Player.”
“How did you know?”
“No one’s easier to read than you.”
He answered bluntly, and Heo Yunji’s expression turned sour.
She touched her cheek absently, then squared her shoulders and thrust out her chest with great pride.
“I found a Monster Tamer, no less.”
“A Monster Tamer? That Player everyone’s been talking about actually showed up?”
“No, that one’s from Zone 4. A boss monster descended there too, just like us — there’s no way they could have made it here.”
Heo Yunji waved that off and pulled her lips into a wide smile.
“Not that one — a different Tamer came.”
Jeong Euijin’s expression remained blank, without a flicker of surprise. Heo Yunji’s excitement deflated slightly as she pursed her lips.
Jeong Euijin was normally a person with little visible emotional range, but today it seemed even more pronounced than usual.
Still, Heo Yunji had plenty more to sell.
“The type of skill is a little different, but I’ll stake my word on it. They’re more useful than that famous Monster Tamer.”
Even as she spoke, she was so giddy about it that she’d forgotten she was on a staircase and was practically bouncing on her heels.
“They’re like catnip! Cat grass! Matatabi! A walking treat!”
“…What’s that supposed to mean. Is that a monster name?”
“What do you even know about anything?”
Heo Yunji looked genuinely offended.
Moments like this, when they were completely on different wavelengths, made it obvious — this guy had clearly spent his entire life before the world turned like this locked in his room playing games.
Thinking about it that way, Heo Yunji found Jeong Euijin and his life-or-death obsession with monster hunting and quests almost a little understandable.
Her expression shifted briefly to one of sympathy as she trotted after Jeong Euijin, who was already heading up the stairs without her.
“Any monster that meets this person just becomes obedient on the spot. And get this — it’s a passive skill, so there’s no need to gather mana and prep like other Players do, and apparently there’s no limit to how many monsters can be pacified at once. The only downside is that the stamina drain scales with it, but that’s something we can manage by adjusting how we deploy them.”
Jeong Euijin glanced back at Heo Yunji as she rattled on, and swallowed the sigh that had risen to the back of his throat.
She’s excited.
His own head was a mess, and he’d been suffocating with a weight in his chest for two straight days — but Heo Yunji was cheerfully chattering away, oblivious to his state. Not that she could know how tangled up he felt, since he’d never told her what the Special Supply Station’s NPC meant to him.
When they reached the third floor, Heo Yunji stepped in front of the staircase leading up and grinned.
“Well? Want to meet them?”
Jeong Euijin tiredly pushed her aside. Anyone else would never have dreamed of budging Heo Yunji with her high strength stat, but Jeong Euijin shifted her out of the way without effort and reached for the door to the stairs.
“You handle it however you see fit. I’m not interested.”
“Come on, just once——”
— Euijin.
A telepathic voice cut into his mind in an instant, and Jeong Euijin’s head snapped around. The eyes that had gone dull with exhaustion and emptiness lit up in a single breath.
Jeong Euijin strode to the corridor window, where he could see Roks’s red eyes hovering in midair, level with his own.
“What happened?”
He asked with hope in his voice — but Roks gave a small shake of his head, dark as a piece of the night sky itself.
— I’m sorry.
The exhaustion he’d been fighting off crashed back over him. His eyes darkened in an instant and the hand resting against the windowsill clenched tight.
He had held onto the hope that Roks might be able to find the NPC in another zone — but it seemed that too had been nothing but wishful thinking.
Roks, whose eyes had gone just as dark as his, was watching him with quiet sorrow when he suddenly lifted his head.
— But. Something is strange.
Roks’s reptilian eyes — the pupils long and vertically slit — flashed red as he swept his gaze over the villa building.
— Youngest’s presence. In the hideout.
“What?”
Roks, who had been hovering still in the air scanning the surroundings, now descended to land below the building entirely, picking through the crowd of Players with careful eyes.
— Close. Here. Certain.
The conviction in Roks’s voice was matched by the urgency in his heavy, resounding footsteps. The people below stirred quite a bit at the appearance of an unusual pet — and a dragon nearly the height of a person at that.
“What? What’s Roks saying?”
Since Roks’s telepathy was only audible to Jeong Euijin as his owner, Heo Yunji had no idea what was going on.
“He says his sibling is here.”
“His sibling?”
Heo Yunji, who had been puzzled, suddenly let out a gasp of delight. A faint flush spread across her cheeks.
“Now that you mention it — that person had a small white dragon sitting on their head. Nothing like Roks, it was absolutely adorable, like a little ball of cotton candy.”
Whether Roks heard that, the dragon outside launched himself upward in a single leap. He fixed his two red eyes on Heo Yunji with a fierce, wide-open stare.
— Guide me. Youngest. Where?
Roks was clearly desperate to see his sibling.
Jeong Euijin, who had no siblings of his own, found it hard to understand Roks’s excitement — but for Roks’s sake, he reluctantly accepted that he would have to meet this so-called Monster Tamer.
I already don’t like them.
Jeong Euijin had zero interest in who this Monster Tamer Player was or what skill made them so capable. Whether they existed or not, he was going to be the one to hunt down and kill the Minotaur Lord who had destroyed the Special Supply Station regardless.
He’d been content to leave this oddly skilled Player entirely in Heo Yunji’s hands since they couldn’t offer him any synergy — but if they had Roks’s younger sibling as a pet, that was a different story.
Roks’s sibling was the last pet that had remained at the Special Supply Station until the very end. In every practical sense, the only living creature that could have eased even a little of that NPC’s loneliness.
Even if a Player had purchased it fair and square, it must have felt to that NPC like having their own pet stolen right from under them.
And yet, bound by the system, they would have had no choice but to smile and hand over the Pet Egg without a word — and thinking about that made the weight in his chest grow even heavier.
Jeong Euijin, who had already formed a resentment toward a Monster Tamer he’d never even met, gestured for Heo Yunji to lead the way.
“Take me to that Monster Tamer.”
“Oh — right. This way.”
She’d already been planning to bring them together from the start, which was why she’d been blocking the stairs to the fourth floor — so Heo Yunji stepped briskly down the corridor. Jeong Euijin, carrying what felt almost like killing intent, and the Black Dragon keeping perfect pace with him outside the window made for quite a menacing sight.
The people in the corridor cleared a path on their own, and those in their rooms poked their heads out to watch Jeong Euijin pass.
Before long, Heo Yunji and Jeong Euijin came to a stop in front of a steel door at the far end of the corridor.
Screech! Screech, screech—!
A sharp, persistent scratching sound came from inside, clawing against the door over and over.
Heo Yunji was just about to knock in puzzlement when —
“Okay, okay. I’ll open it, just hold on.”
The door swung open from the inside.
“Kyaooo—!”
With a long, roaring cry, the small white dragon shot between Heo Yunji and Jeong Euijin and launched itself straight out the corridor window —
“Huh?”
— and a pale-skinned young man, nearly as white as the dragon itself, appeared in the doorway.
“…Jeong Euijin?”
The moment the young man spoke his name —
the heavy, oppressive air that had been pressing in from all sides shifted, all at once.
